Hello everyone! I am happy to be here and to see so many of you, engaged in the climate and our environment.

The film clearly shows the devastating impacts of climate change and who is paying the price. The climate deniers will find it more and more difficult to make their argument sound convincing. The facts are taking over.

People's engagement is growing like a tidal wave – together we will succeed in saving our planet. But we need to act fast.

So first of all I would like to congratulate the United States and China on showing international leadership and ratifying the Paris Agreement. It's worth a warm round of applause.

Now, country after country is ratifying the Agreement and we are getting close to the magic number of 55. Fifty-five countries need to ratify, covering at least 55 per cent of global emissions in order for the Paris Agreement to take effect.

When some of us meet at the climate conference in Marrakesh in November, as a follow-up to Paris, we might have crossed that line.

+++

Politicians, business leaders, people are seeing in real life that climate change is here, it is happening. Fires, heat waves, floods, fish deaths, plastic taking over our oceans, droughts.... We can't turn a blind eye to it anymore.

Some say we stand at a crossroads: should we continue down the fossil fuel path or choose the renewable one?

I argue that we have already chosen, we are heading towards a sustainable society based on renewable alternatives inspired by nature itself.

The transition is taking place. And with the Paris Agreement we have a clear legal framework pointing out the direction that we must follow: the future is sustainable. This spurs innovations and smart solutions and will speed up the transition further.

Politicians like me need to act on this. The emitters must pay and we must stop subsidising fossil fuels and instead make climate-smart investments.

In Sweden, we will go to the Parliament next week with the budget for 2017 – it contains the biggest environmental investment in Swedish history. We are investing to help municipalities make the transition – we call it the 'Climate Leap'.

+++

And we need climate justice.

It is not fair that the people in Bangladesh pay the price for our – the western world's – emissions that sparked our economic development. I visited the communities we saw in the film. I felt their fear and heard their worries about what the future would bring them.

Trapped between the rise in sea levels and the melting glaciers of the Himalayas.

But I also met resistance; they are not giving up.

We will support them in becoming more resilient to the effects of climate change and leap-frogging to the future energy market. Solar energy is already playing an important role in the communities I visited. A family I met told me how the solar panel on their hut enabled their children to do their homework at night, improving their school results.

There are 1.3 billion people in the world who lack access to energy; 1.3 billion. It affects every part of their life and impedes their chances to develop. This is a huge challenge and opportunity. Through climate financing we can help them, like the villagers in Bangladesh, to leap-frog into the future with clean energy.